Reimagining Classics as an Emerging Global Paradigm: Lessons from China

Classicists in the West today face an ongoing crisis of their field, including waning institutional support, limited positions for graduates, or political and populist misuses of the classical past. On the contrary, China has witnessed the blossoming of classical studies both Western and Chinese: not only is the number of students growing, the study of Western classics also informs the education of the country's elites and the general public, and classics-centered curricula have recently formed the core of China's major educational reforms. This essay suggests two practical means toward forging a global disciplinary paradigm, namely, philologically intensive translation and teaching. The cultural encounter and linguistic boundary-crossing in translation can destabilize the idea of a cultural relic as belonging exclusively to one tradition. And the teaching of the classics to a wide student body of mostly nonmajors communicates humanistic learning to the public that secures legitimacy for the humanities in a world where global cultural literacy is increasingly mandatory for people all over the world.